


Gonna Open Me Up A Black Gold Vein

by Zee (orphan_account)



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-17
Updated: 2007-03-17
Packaged: 2017-11-10 15:59:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/468080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Zee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ororo isn't used to this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gonna Open Me Up A Black Gold Vein

**Author's Note:**

> Written for bossymarmalade for femslash_07.

Ororo doesn't know how Xavier's school is always both too small and far too large. It's a school built to eventually house hundreds, if not thousands, of students, and with only three other students and two 'professors', every step she takes echoes in the hallways. Yet the entire complex is fenced in, even the parks and schoolyards outside the building are enclosed. She's not allowed to fly and she respects that rule, understands why it's there, but it still makes something beneath her skin itch to be enclosed in a bubble like this.

After she's been here for a few weeks, Xavier takes her aside and asks her if she's homesick. And she's not, because you'd have to be fucking crazy to be *homesick* for life as a starving pickpocket, but there are--things that are absent from her life now, and their absence makes life at Xavier's seem not quite real.

She shrugs instead of saying all that, but Xavier keeps looking at her, expecting her to speak. Xavier doesn't let her get away with many silences, she's noticed. "It's too clean here," she says, for lack of any better way to explain it.

"Well, yes. Education regulations require us to be at least somewhat sanitary." Xavier's voice is calm, light, smooth, the kind of voice that doesn't even require telepathy to convince you to do something. Ororo can never tell if he's making fun of her or not.

She shakes her head. "Not sanitary. It's--" The kind of clean that's beneath the surface, something gleaming and untouched and pure, a quality that doesn't exist *anywhere* in Cairo--not on the streets, not even in the homes of people rich enough to hire a different maid for each room in their mansion. "--everything is just. Clean," she finishes, the words lame and awkward on her tongue. Xavier keeps looking at her, and she wonders if he thinks that her lack of eloquence comes from a shitty grasp of the english language, if he thinks she doesn't have it down yet.

Ororo understands english just fine--Xavier made sure of that when he dumped it all into her head, when she agreed to move to this country and go to his school. It's just that she doesn't like it, all these words and sounds that should be unfamiliar floating around in her head. She doesn't use all the vocabulary and complex sentences he gave her because it creeps her out, sends chills down her spine. There are nights when she wonders how english and arabic can both exist in her head, wonders if Xavier's words will someday push her native tongue out for good.

Xavier usually pulls her aside to ask questions like that at least once a week--is she homesick, is she sleeping all right, how are her classes are going? Just checking up on her. She gets it. She's the new girl who came all the way from Egypt and was practically driven crazy by her powers (well, crazy by his definition--she just thought of it as being closer to the elements, at the time). He's trying to make sure that she adjusts. It's an admirable effort but it's beginning to grate on her, and these days she can't help but grit her teeth or roll her eyes every time Xavier starts. If he notices, it just serves to make his voice all the more sincere and paternal.

Professor Lehnsherr never asks her anything. It's not that he's not paying attention, or at least she doesn't think so. He seems to be watching her, all the time, his eyes sharp and gray. It feels deliberate, the way he treats her exactly the same as Jean and Scott and Hank, as if he's daring her to act up and make him treat her differently. She knows he must be invested in her--importing her has to be a big risk for the school, one that he'll want to pay off--but unlike Xavier, he never shows it.

Three weeks after her first class, she has a nightmare. Nothing special, nothing new: the same old fear of being trapped, suffocating, with blackness all around her. Xavier's presence in her mind snaps her out of it, surprising her awake, and when her eyes fly open and her body jerks, Jean's hand is on her shoulder. Ororo guesses that that's supposed to be comforting, but she just feels held down.

"What?" she gasps. Xavier and Lehnsherr are both sitting on the edge of her bed, looking alarmed; Jean's eyes are wide and scared.

"You need to calm yourself," Lehnsherr hisses, and Ororo turns to stare out the window even though she knows, even though she can already feel it humming in her veins. She can see the largest tornado off in the distance; the smaller funnels are already close to the school. She can already hear the wind shrieking.

Her skin is clammy and cold and Ororo is curling in on herself on automatic, her forehead between her knees, elbows wrapped around herself. Jean's hand tightens on her shoulder until it's painful. Jean is frightened for her life; Ororo would be, but she's trying as hard as she can to feel nothing at all.

Ororo-- Xavier's presence is immediately in her mind, loud and invasive and all she can think is Go AWAY, and he answers ('answers,' he can't answer because he's not *talking* he's just in her *head*) The sooner you get control of yourself and make this stop, I will.

She forces herself to take deep breaths, tries to get her heart rate down, and this time Xavier is there, guiding her and bringing her mood down, helping her become numb. She has a vague dim feeling, in the back of her mind, that she would be furious at this if she didn't--if she were anything but calm.

The tornados disperse and she can see the clouds part and disappear as Xavier eases out of her mind. Even though he hadn't been physically holding her at all, when the sky is clear and Xavier's presence is gone Ororo collapses, falls back like someone has cut all her strings. Jean's arms cushion her, and Ororo squeezes her eyes shut.

"Good job," Xavier says quietly.

"We need to work on your control," Lehnsherr says, standing up to leave. Ororo just nods, sleep already hitting her, and she barely registers Jean untangling herself and sliding out from under her before she falls asleep.

The next day, Xavier pulls her aside again, asks her how she feels, and Ororo has to close her eyes for a moment to concentrate on keeping her calm, instead of getting angry enough to cause a thunderstorm.

"Never get into my head like that again." When she opens her eyes, glaring, Xavier doesn't look phased at all.

"It was, unfortunately, necessary--"

"I would have stopped it on my own! I'm not green like the others, I'm not *incompetent*--"

"I'm afraid I couldn't take that risk." And Xavier's voice is no longer friendly and soft. He sounds the way he *didn't* sound in her head, last night. "You didn't tell us you've been having nightmares."

Ororo feels something catch and twist in her chest. "Everyone has bad dreams sometimes."

"Yes, but not everyone's unconscious emotions create weather phenomena. While control is important for all of our students, for the safety of this school it has become necessary to take extra steps with you. I've been conducting individual meditation sessions with Jean Grey for some time now, and she's advanced to the point where I think it would be good for the both of you to meditate together."

"You--" Ororo gapes. "You're making me take extra classes from another student? One who's *younger* than me?"

"It's not an extra class; it's a time for both of you to practice calming yourselves, clearing your thoughts and improving your focus. She will be teaching you at first, but after a few sessions I think you'll get the hang of it." Xavier smiles, like he doesn't notice Ororo fuming. "You might even find it rewarding. Your first session will be today at four, in room 204."

Jean looks nervous when Ororo steps into the classroom later that day; even though their rooms are right next to each other, they've never spent much time together. Ororo has never been tempted to join her or Henry or Scott outside of the classroom. They're friendly enough, but Ororo doesn't think they would understand her, and vice versa. The last time she ran around with a group of kids her own age, they picked pockets and started fist-fights for entertainment, and even that ended when one of them narrowly missed getting hit by lightning after he'd done something or other to piss Ororo off. She doesn't remember exactly what had happened--maybe he'd insulted her, pushed her down in the dirt, pulled her hair, something--but after that she didn't stick around town long enough to find out if any of her friends were still willing to talk to her.

Today Jean has her long hair (not as long as Ororo's, and not as pretty, either) in two braids; she fingers the end of one braid as she talks, probably a nervous habit, and chews on her lip when Ororo says "Fine, meditation. Let's just begin and get it over with."

"Okay," Jean says, and sits down on one of the square pillows on the floor, crossing her long legs underneath her. Ororo drags a pillow next to her and sits, closes her eyes and listens to Jean talk quietly about posture, letting all the tension drain from her muscles, focusing on breathing deep. And then she gets into visualization, asking Ororo to imagine every detail of the place she most wants to be, a place that she feels settled and complete in. It sounds fairly ridiculous, but Jean's voice is sweet and lilting and Ororo finds that it's easy enough to imagine herself miles up in the sky, in the center of a storm, whipped by the rain and wind and lightning. Finds herself remembering vividly the four straight days she spent in the sky after she got her powers, remembering what it was like to forget she was human and not just part of it all.

She's not sure how much time passes; after a while, Jean stops talking. When Ororo opens her eyes, Jean is looking at the sunlight streaming in through the window.

"It's a beautiful day," she says, turning to grin at Ororo. "Did you do that?"

Ororo feels her lips stretching. Jean's smile is contagious. "I'm not sure. Maybe."

Ororo's surprised by how much she enjoys the meditation, and more so by how much she enjoys Jean. After a while she begins to see why Xavier wanted Jean to meditate in the first place: before they start she's agitated and broody, switching between talkative and quiet. Usually after a few hours of sitting together she seems lighter, her body more relaxed; less conflicted. Ororo wonders what's bottled up inside her that she has to let out, that bothers her enough that Xavier thought this was necessary in the first place.

She's hazy on what Jean's powers are, exactly. She knows she can move things without touching them, but from the way she and Xavier talk it seems like there's something more to it than that.

She asks Jean about it, one afternoon when they've finished meditating and are just lying on pillows, talking. Ororo has never had a friendship like this, one that consists of lying in sunlit rooms and talking quietly with each other, about anything and everything, lazy with all the time in the world. Jean bites her lip and looks down; one of her braids falls over her face.

"It's a little bit of telepathy, too," she says. "Nothing like Xavier's, and I can't really control when it comes and goes; mostly I just--overhear people, sometimes. Dreams or fantasies, things like that, the kind of thoughts that people project a lot without meaning to."

Ororo wants to undo Jean's braids and run her fingers through her hair, brush it out over her lap and braid it again. "Have you ever overheard mine?"

"Yeah," Jean admits, shooting Ororo an apologetic look. "That nightmare you had, that night with the tornado--your dream woke me up."

Ororo nods; Jean looks like she expects Ororo to be mad, but she's not, not really. It's not like Jean can control it; it's not like she's Xavier, barging in where she's not wanted.

"Sometimes--" Jean snickers like she just can't hold the laughter inside. "I've seen Scott's dreams a few times. He, um." She turns bright red. "He dreams about me. It's really weird."

"Yeah?" Ororo smiles, and gives in to the urge to play with Jean's braid, taking the end of it, fingering the split ends and toying with the elastic band.

"Yeah. I can tell I'm in his head because my boobs are always bigger." Ororo laughs at that, and so does Jean, throwing her head back. A thought occurs to Ororo, and she scoots closer, cups Jean's cheek and presses their lips together.

Jean makes a high, stifled sound against Ororo's mouth, but she doesn't move away. When Ororo pulls back, Jean's eyes are round and wide, staring at her.

"Um." Jean presses her lips together and doesn't look away from Ororo. Ororo is mildly surprised at how anxious she is about this, how hard her heart is beating in her chest. She hadn't thought that Jean's approval meant much to her either way, but now the thought that she's scared her away--freaked her out--sets off alarm bells in her head.

But then Jean visibly relaxes and leans in, and Ororo kisses her again. It's better this time, with Ororo's mouth open and Jean's tongue sliding against her lips, and when Ororo puts a hand on her hip, and then under her shirt, Jean just pushes into her touch.

Ororo hasn't had sex since before she got her powers, and even then it was just one boy--Ahmed, a fellow gang-member. He had liked her body, told her so often and in many ways until she relented. It had been fun and dirty and often took place semi-publically, in alleyways and under alcoves. He'd done it best with his hands rather than his tongue or his cock, and she hadn't realized how much she'd *missed* sex until she started having it again with Jean.

Xavier stops checking in on her around the same time, and it's hard not to be suspicious, to wonder if their secret schoolgirl affair isn't actually secret at all. No matter how many times Xavier has promised that he doesn't invade their minds unless absolutely necessary, she's never really going to believe him.

But he could also be reassured by the regular meditation, or by Ororo making friends instead of 'isolating' herself, which had worried him so much before. And the meditation actually seems to be doing the job Xavier wanted it to: there haven't been any more nightmares that cause natural disasters, and the sky no longer rumbles with thunder clouds whenever she's angry or sad. She's making progress, he tells her, and maybe it's silly and childish, but Ororo starts to let herself hope that maybe Xavier and his idealistic dreams really can work for her, get her powers under control and let her function as a human. She crossed an ocean for that idea, but it never actually seemed like anything that could be real until now.

It's easy enough for Ororo to spend whole nights with Jean. Usually it's Jean who comes into Ororo's room, quietly cracking the door open around midnight--after the first few times, she stops knocking first. Jean blushes again when she sees that Ororo sleeps naked, and glares, huffy when Ororo laughs at her.

"I'm not a *prude,*" she insists. "And yeah, I've seen you naked before, I just--expected you to be wearing pajamas or something."

Pajamas like Jean's, maybe, soft cotton plaid pants and a worn gray t-shirt with a hole in the armpit. Ororo loves undressing her, loves glancing over in the middle of the night at Jean's pajamas in a pile on her floor.

Often they'll fall asleep all tangled together, Jean's arm around Ororo's hip or her leg slid in between Ororo's thighs. It makes Ororo uncomfortable, not enough to push her away, but whenever she wakes up in the morning they've ended up on opposite sides of the bed.

One night Jean jerks hard enough that it wakes Ororo up. She lifts her head from the pillow, groggy with sleep, to look at Jean. She's breathing hard--panting.

"What?" Ororo croaks out, her tongue thick.

"Nnn--nothing," Jean says. Her voice is thin, breathless. "Just, um. I got stuck in one of Scott's dreams again."

Ororo is more asleep than awake, so she doesn't quite connect Jean's words to her hardened nipples or the slight sheen of sweat on her skin. She just nods and lays her head back down, drifts again into sleep.

Of course Ororo's noticed how badly Scott wants to fuck Jean--it's not like it's surprising. Jean is one of only two girls in the school, and Ororo knows he's too terrified of *her,* so that leaves Jean. But when she puts it that way to Jean, she flushes and scowls.

"It's not like that," she snaps. "He's not--crude, and he doesn't even want--he just, you know. He likes me a little, that's all."

He likes her a lot, it's obvious, and Ororo can tell that Jean feels the same way. She giggles more than usual around him, she looks at him even when he isn't looking at her. Ororo isn't jealous or angry, because Jean is still with her most nights and on their meditation afternoons, but there's a nagging awareness in the back of her mind that that won't last forever.

And so it doesn't come as a surprise, exactly, when Jean turns her head to the side one day, offering her cheek rather than her lips when Ororo leans in to kiss her.

"I shouldn't--Scott and I, we're," and yes. She and Scott are holding hands in the hallway, sharing shy smiles, leaning into each other whenever they talk, their heads bent as if everything they're saying is a fragile secret. Ororo knows.

She doesn't press the subject, just leans back away. Jean's eyebrows furrow in a concerned frown.

"Are you mad? Ororo, we can still--I like you, too. We're still friends."

And Ororo wants to say that they were never friends in the first place and they sure as hell won't be now, wants to be vicious and sharp and see the hurt register all over Jean's face, but she holds back. She wants to cling to this because there's so much more she could show Jean, so much more they could do, but she knows that if she fights for her she'll lose. Even if she won, kept Jean out of Scott's waiting loving boyish arms, she's not sure if the fight would be worth it.

"I'm not mad," she says instead.

That afternoon she ignores Xavier's rules and flies, up above the mansion until the whole school is just a speck in the landscape. It thunders and rains that night, but it's a stormfront that's been predicted for a week, caused naturally. Ororo has learned how to keep herself blank, how to repress herself the way Xavier wanted.

He pulls her aside the next day--the first time he's done so in months. Asks her all right, his eyes mildly concerned, a friendly smile on his face. Ororo feels sick, wonders if he's read her mind thoroughly and seen her touching Jean a thousand times.

"I'm fucking fine," she says, and it's the first time she's cursed in front of him. But he doesn't reprimand her, doesn't seem angry or surprised; he just nods, and Ororo stomps away.

She has the nightmare again that night, and wakes up with her heart in her throat, holding her breath and listening for a hurricane outside. But there's nothing, a soft breeze, the temperature mild.

Ororo gets out of bed, pulling on pants and a shirt before stepping out into the hallway, to the bathroom. When she looks at her reflection she looks like the same person she was a few months ago: long matted silver hair, bags under her eyes, round face, too-sharp chin.

She finds a pair of scissors and starts cutting, watches fascinated as long graceful shanks of silver hair fall in the sink, curling like dying life forms. She snips and clips and cuts, and when she looks in the mirror it looks awful--she won't be able to get it right without being able to shave her hair close to her skull, and without gel the mohawk parts naturally in the middle and flops on either side instead of standing up. But she can see how she'll look once she gets it fixed, and she likes it. She can imagine the expression on Jean's face when she sees it, too, and the way Xavier will look at her calculatingly, like he's wondering if this latest personality twist means she's going to start a lightning storm within the school or freeze them all to death in a blizzard.

Let him wonder.


End file.
